Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

0xGioMedici is the founder of Abacus, a nascent NFT lending protocol experimenting with new ways to value and borrow against NFTs. On this episode, GioMedici joins me for a wide-ranging conversation about the latest developments in machine learning, new opportunities in blockchain design, and his own project, which recently soft launched on Ethereum mainnet. In the first part of this conversation, we discuss Gio’s exploration of ChatGPT, and the surprising information he’s found within the latest model’s training dataset. We discuss Gio’s meditations the future convergence of verifiable blockchain data and large language models, and how apparel brands might adopt these techonologies. In the second half of the who, we go deep on the current state of NFT lending, and how Abacus is trying to unlock new value stored in NFTs. It was fun musing with Gio on these topics. I hope you enjoy the show. As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. If you would like to talk to the EVM dev community, consider buying an ad on a future episode of this show. Ads are sold as NFTs and paid in ETH. Visit web3galaxybrain.com for more information.

On today’s episode I’m joined by and Jorge Izquierdo and Alejandro Perezpayá.   Jorge Izquierdo is the co-founder of Aragon, the first full featured on-chain DAO governance system. On this episode, Jorge and Alejandro Perezpayá join me to discuss the history of Aragon and their new startup Firm. First, Jorge tells the story of how he and Luis Cuende pivoted from a building a startup to fight patent trolls to cofounding Aragon in 2016, the year of the infamous DAO fork. We discuss the evolution of Aragon, and what worked and what didn’t in the first iteration of onchain governance tooling on Ethereum. In the second half of the show we focus on Firm. Firm is an operating system for internet companies. The product combines Safe’s multisig permissions affordances, Ricardian contracts for incorporation in a specific jurisdiction, and onchain representations of capitalization tables for transparent and onchain corporate ownership. As always, this show is provided for entertainment and education purposes only and does not constitute financial advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto is risky and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions. I think a lot of people with experience building DAOs discover a newfound appreciation for the tried and true corporate firm. It was great speaking with Jorge and Alejandro about their journey and perspective on the future of internet native companies. I hope you enjoy the show.

On today’s episode, I’m joined by Juan Fran Blanco. Juan is the creator of “Solidity”, the most popular Solidity-oriented VSCode extension in the world. The extension provides hundreds of thousands of Solidity developers daily access to syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and much more. Juan’s main focus is Nethereum, a .NET framework for interacting with EVM blockchains. Nethereum is useful for interacting with the blockchain from Microsoft based operating systems, which constitute a huge number of the virtual and physical devices in the world. In this episode, we discuss Juan’s experiences working on Ujo Music with Simon De La Rouviere and Karl Floersch, how the Solidity VSCode extension works under the hood, and what role Nethereum plays in the ecosystem. It was great getting to talk 1-on-1 with someone whose software I use every day. I hope you enjoy this episode.

On today’s episode I’m joined by Stelo Labs co-founders Ben Scharfstein and Aman Dhesi. Stelo Labs first product is Stelo, a browser extension that simulates transactions and provides clarifying contextual information and a risk assessment in a pop-up before the transaction request propagates to user’s wallet. They also provide an API that gives developers access to the transaction simulation and risk assessment backend that powers the browser extension. They’ve used this API to create approvals.xyz, a token approval dashboard akin to revoke.cash or the Etherscan approvals page. In this episode we discuss how Stelo works, and get a little bit of alpha about an upcoming Stelo API powered interface they’re building to enable safe interactions with arbitrary smart contracts. It was good to meet Ben and Aman and get to know their thought process around wallet security and analytical data service providers. I hope you enjoy the show Links - https://www.stelolabs.com/ - https://docs.stelolabs.com/ - https://approvals.xyz/ - https://www.halborn.com/blog/post/what-is-an-mpc-wallet - https://zengo.com/mpc-wallet/ - https://www.fireblocks.com/ - https://web3auth.io/ - https://entropy.xyz/

On today’s show, I’m joined by Munam Wasi, COO at Delegate Cash. Delegate Cash’s first product is an immutable NFT delegation registry. Users can delegate access rights to NFTs in their possession to other public addresses on the various EVM chains where Delegate Cash is deployed. Future airdrops and offchain token gating software can integrate delegate cash’s contracts, to allow people to interact  with minting contracts and verify on Discord, all from delegated hotwallet without ever touching the wallet that holds their precious NFT. Munam and I discuss the current product and ERC-5639 Delegation Registry, co-authored by Delegate Cash founder 0xfoobar, Wilkins Chung from Manifold, Ryley-o and Jake Rockland from Artblocks, and Andy from Tessera. We also discuss their new liquid staking project. This episode is the third interview I’ve done with wallet security software providers. If you’re interested in the subject, check out my interviews with Harpie and Fire. It was great chatting with Munam about Delegate Cash. I hope you enjoy the show.

On February 17, 2023, Context and Mint.Fun co-founder Worm_emoji, aka Luke Miles tweeted “Can someone have me on a podcast to discuss how Blur used OpenSea's own protocol to defeat them on the royalties / creator fees issue?” I responded to the call, and a couple of hours later, Luke, John Palmer from PartyDAO, Jacob the CEO of Zora, and I got on Twitter Spaces to Blur, OpenSea, and the proxy war being fought over NFT Royalties. This is a fantastic episode that covers a good chunk of Blur’s history, discusses the battle between the two biggest NFT marketplaces on Ethereum, and provides insight into the thought processes of founders at the cutting edge of NFT product strategy and jockeying network effects. If you enjoy this in-depth technical and philosophical discussion, please scroll through the episode list and download something that catches your eye. Subscribe to the show, or join me for a live recording on Twitter @nnnnicholas. Would you like to speak to my audience? Buy a 30 second ad spot NFT at web3galaxybrain.com. I read all the ads live on air and include them in the podcast feed. My thanks to everyone who attended. I hope you enjoy the show.

I’m joined today by Harpie founder Daniel Chong. Harpie describes itself as an onchain firewall that protects NFTs from theft. In this episode we discuss how Harpie’s mempool monitoring and emergency vault contract works on a technical level. We also cover Harpie’s unique business model, and their growing enterprise service which grants organizations like OpenSea access to their malicious transaction data. We touch on their plans to build an RPC provider in the future that can detect dangerous transactions before they reach the mempool. At the end of the show, Daniel and I discuss Bitcoin Ordinals. It was great getting to understand the approach Harpie is taking to wallet security. I think there’s a lot to learn from this episode. I hope you enjoy the show. Links - https://harpie.io/ - Harpie Whitepaper - Jameson Lopp’s Bitcoin Physical Attacks - Jameson Lopp’s Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Reviews - https://ordinals.com/

In 2022, Paradigm launched a CTF game called 0xMonaco. 3 players are in a race to the 1000 block finish line. Each car is armed with 15,000 coins which they can spend on acceleration or throwing shells to slow down their opponents. Prices adjust dynamically according to a variable rate gradual Dutch auction. Competitors submit Solidity contracts that manage these resources on their behalf. MatchboxDAOis a blockchain gaming platform that has forked the original 0xMonaco competition, augmented it with more features, a rich 3D visualization, and live commentated Twitch Streams to reveal the results of the races. On this episode I’m joined by MatchboxDAO Head of Product Natan Benish, Growth Lead Louthing, and Jazzy and Aaron from security firm Zellic, who found and exploited vulnerabilities in the most recent Matchbox Arena competition. The platform that Matchbox is building is successfully drawing the attention and competitive spirit of the crypto dev community. This episode is also the first time that the Matchbox dev team and the Zellic hackers speak verbally, and it was a fun and ultimately heartwarming discussion. I hope you enjoy the show. Links sudolabel.eth’s explanation of 0xMonaco Introducing MatchboxDAO: The Battle of the Titans Introducing Matchbox Arena Zellic’s postmortem

Today, I'm joined by Hamzah Khan, Head of DeFi at Polygon. This episode is an inquiry into the secret internal dynamics that set Polygon apart in the blockchain ecosystem. Polygon is known for a run of incredible business development successes, including deep partnerships with Reddit, Starbucks, and OpenSea. But underlying this extraordinary BD is a unique ability to pragmatically manage multiple simultaneous projects. Polygon is an organization whose execution merits study. Together, Hamzah and I try to figure out how Polygon is able to build a crypto network that spans several generations of blockchain scaling technology, while also appealing to the biggest brands in the world. This is one of my favorite episodes of the show so far. It's always a pleasure speaking with Hamzah, who is direct, funny, and personable. I learned a lot in this conversation. I hope you enjoy the show.

Today on the show I’m joined by Jeff Krantz and Josh Breite, cofounders of Fire. Fire is a consumer oriented EVM transaction simulator designed to keep blockchain transactors from losing their NFTs and fungibles to malicious transaction requests. In its current form, Fire is a Chromium browser extension. When a dapp requests a Metamask wallet signature, a Fire window pops up next to Metamask, providing human readable context on what this transaction will do. Requests for NFT transfer permissions and fungible token transfers are displayed in clear language, with a picture of any NFTs that will be affected. In this conversation, Jeff and Josh share the origins of Fire, its mission, and how the extension works on a technical level, including aspects of its tech stack. We discuss a variety of common attack patterns that users should watch out for, and some signature request types that are generally innocuous. We also discuss what trust implications prospective Fire users should consider before installing the extension in their browser, and whether or not remote simulation of transactions is a privacy concern. It was great chatting with Jeff and Josh about the ins-and-outs of Fire, especially in light of the recent swath of OG wallet hacks these past few weeks. I hope you enjoy the show.